ADD Humor on cleaning

First, please remember the disclaimer listed under the “About Me” section on the right side.

Finally the last of the laundry is spinning away in the dryer, the floor is nearly dry, dishwasher only has the remnants of supper’s utensils inside it, and the whole place smells of an improvised cleaning solution of cooking wine and 409. When my apartment is in a state such as this, it can only mean one thing. Mother is coming to town.

Like a lot of sons, I always spend a bit of extra time cleaning the apartment before she arrives. The whole place could smell and look like a pigsty for Dad, but for Mom, it must be clean. Its not that Mom will complain if its not, but she’ll be unable to withstand her motherly instincts and start cleaning it for me. She can’t help herself, its just how she’s wired. Also like a lot of bachelors, when it comes to cleaning, it doesn’t come naturally for me. This time, it only required about four hours of fine tuning. In times not far ago, for me this would be a three week ordeal requiring a maximum effort and nerves of steel. I hope this means things are progressing. You’d think my limited military experience would have turned me into a clean freak. Be assured it did NOT !! If anything, the Army taught me how tedious and unpleasant cleaning is, and I’ve taken every opportunity since to rebel against Green Mother’s ways. Past tales of the hygienic state of my residences have become the thing of family legend and unfortunately there is too many elements of truth to these myths. I’ll not reveal a few of those for your reading pleasure.

When it comes to hygiene its important to understand that I don’t have a very good sense of smell. Repeated bouts of flue and head colds during my early years somehow damaged my olfactory senses. If I can smell it, it is bad. Often times, I can literally feel the odor blast blow over my face and still be unable to detect the offending odor. In the course of a first aide training seminar with the Army, I manage to acquire a very large supply of smelling salts. One night, stone sober even, a group of us started huffing on them to see who could take it the longest. Granted my eyes were burning something awful, but I inhaled eight packets before giving up. The next closest soldier did three. The home I was raised in, is a mile north of a pig farm and two miles east of a turkey farm, so I really never felt the need to complain about this impaired sense. Combine that with an extreme disinterest in cleaning, and its lead to some interesting stories over the years.

One of the first has to do with a lost pumpkin. As a kid, one October, Mom took us to a pumpkin farm where we were allowed to pick out small pumpkins and gourds to paint for Halloween. After affixing my artistic impressions to these decorative squash, I put mine in a cabinet in headboard of my bed and forgot about them. I would not see them again until early summer. I never could smell what Mom and Dad were talking about, but starting in early spring they would start to detect an unpleasant odor in my room. Initially my folks thought I’d spilled something in there and ordered me to clean my room. They started getting ticked off thinking I wasn’t following orders after about the third week and inspected it for themselves. Much to their surprise, they actually found my room to be clean !! The smell progressively became worse and worse. Mom even brought over Grandparents and a friend who ran a maid cleaning service to investigate. No one could figure it out. By early summer it had become almost unbearable for them, though I never did smell it. The odor finally got to Dad one day and in a fit of frustration he went through my room opening every drawer and door in my little domicile. When he opened the cabinet over my headboard, he nearly fainted from the smell. There inside were the jellified remains of what had been a 6lb pumpkin and half a dozen gourds. It required the use of a spatula, hazmat gloves, and a wet bandanna to clear the remains. Poor Dad had to do this himself, Mom and my sister were too busy vomiting and I was too busy laughing to help. It wouldn’t be the first time my lack of olfactory ability would lead to such embarrassment or discomfort, usually for someone else.

There was the time two years ago where I went home and wanting to do help Mom and Dad out, I spent the first half of the day cleaning dog kennels. This is something that gets done about once every few years, involves hydraulic, equipment, and very much resembles hauling manure from a livestock barn. After this, I jumped in the shower and met them and extended family for the annual Christmas gathering. I didn’t realize, nor could I detect that this manure odor usually stays on your body for the next few days regardless of how many times you shower or wash your clothes !!! Here’s how my father put it. “Son there are times a man looks into the eyes of his offspring and just can’t help but feel he’s done well. This is NOT one of them !!”.

I mentioned before that I have a love for all things garlic, some would even say its an unnatural love. At one point in my college years I lived in what basically amounted to a studio apartment that had criminally bad ventilation. While living there one winter, I discovered how amazing the combination of minced garlic and grilled chicken go together. I took eight chicken thighs and put them on my George Foreman Grill and added two heaping table spoons of minced garlic per chicken thigh and another four to the rice dish. One month latter the parents came to visit me. Dad stopped mid-stride walking in the door, involuntarily flinched and said “WOW !!! You scared of vampires son ?”. They spent the next three days trying to air-out my residence and insisting on having all of my clothes dry cleaned. Mom would latter have her revenge.

My beloved George Foreman Grill, has played a pivotal role in a lot of these stories. For some reason, the beef and pork fat that collects in the drip-tray helps generate one of the few foul orders I can smell. I’ve forgotten to empty it a few times only to come back from a 12 hour shift at work to the smell of a biology experiment gone bad. I usually empty it into the trash can, and if I let the trash build up too much before taking it out, there’s always a price to pay. My neighbor was over a few weeks ago and said something about an odor. I opened the lid to my trash can to see if things were due to be changed and it felt as if I was punched in the face. I’d estimate the grease from two weeks of cooking nothing but hamburgers was in there. I have a problem with mold in my apartment, it will start growing on anything it perceives as a food source. If I forget to empty the drip-tray and it sits out for a few days, when I do remember it, its like a Petri-dish from hell inside of it. I’m always certain to kill off anything spawning in there by dousing with a gallon of 409. I want no responsibility for creating a new biological species that man can’t control !! Despite this, George is probably one of my most favorite cooking tools second only to my gas grill. It can turn out high quality meat entries, that are cheaper and more healthy than anything you can warm-up in a microwave. It actually takes less time to make them than it does to nuke most microwave dinners too. Six months ago, Mom got her revenge on my old friend of ten years. As I was getting back on my feet from everything I’ve had to deal with this past year, the folks came down to help me out. In the course of helping me get organized Mom started cleaning again. She saw old George’s grill sitting on the counter with ten years of charred meat and seasoning hard baked onto the “non-stick” grates, knew there was no possible way to clean it well enough to meet basic standards of sanitation, and made me throw the old girl out. My new one grills things very very fast and it has taken some getting used to. Dad believes it’s because the heat doesn’t have to work its way through two inches of grit and grim before reaching the food.

Two more stories, then I’m wrapping this up. The first is actually unrelated but still funny. My first year at THE Ohio State University, I lived in your stereo-typical run- down town home on South Campus, with three other guys. All of us were prior military and not the sort of early twenty something’s who are still learning how to deal with things. It became obvious by the second day that this place had a serious mouse problem. There were mouse tracks all over the place, and any food not kept in a sealed container, ended-up a victim to their nightly patrols. We argued with the landlord for a month about the problem. They kept saying there was no problem, we were just trying to find an excuse to jip them on rent. Finally, one day we went to a hardware store and found a deal on mouse traps. It was twelve for a buck or something like that, anyhow we got a ton of them. That night, all we heard was the snapping of mouse traps, baited with peanut butter, and actually had to get-up at one point and reset most of them. In two days we caught twenty of them. It almost gagged us, we knew we had a problem, but were surprised to learn just how bad it was. When the count reached thirty with no end in sight, it occurred to us that it was only a matter of time before the mice led a successful revolt and took full control of the house. Still our calls to the real-estate company to inform them of these findings and renew our request for someone to come out and take care of the problem fell on deaf ears. So we took about twenty dead mice placed them in zip lock bags, along with our rent checks, and a letter we signed saying, “Here’s the rent, paid in full, along with proof of the vermin infestation. We request that you please send an exterminator out here. Be assured that the next request will be sent through an attorney. Thank-you”. They got someone out there latter that day, along with the company’s sincerest apologies for this “misunderstanding”. Clearly someone at the real-estate company thought we were psychopaths. We weren’t, we just felt there was a “failure to communicate” and wanted to help clarify things in such a way as to not be “misunderstood“ again.

Last one. During the same visit that Mom made me say good bye to old George, I also learned that drinking and vacuuming doesn’t mix much better than drinking and driving. My vacuum got plugged up, and while I’d been able to fix it, it wasn’t quite the same and I had to empty the dirt from the hose before it got to the tank. While we were certain something else was still plugging it up, we could not determine what or where. Dad and I pulled the whole thing apart twice, reamed out the hose and pipes with a broom handle, and anything else we could think of. The vacuum was a couple minutes away from suffering the same fate my grill had just suffered when Mom realized we hadn’t checked the coupler where the hose attaches to the vacuum tank. When we pulled that off, we found a very bent-up beer bottle cap wedged in there blocking ¾ of the opening. So kids remember, don’t drink and drive and don’t drink and vacuum, neither will end well.

With that though, this is the Redheaded Rambler signing off.